Paul Krugman criticized the Trump administration for its budget, which would cut or eliminate many programs that benefit low- and moderate-income people. In his piece, Krugman points out that the public is incredibly ignorant on the budget, with most people having virtually no idea of where most spending goes.
In particular, he referenced an analysis that found people on average believed we spend more than 30 percent of the budget on foreign aid. The actual figure is less than one percent.
This is the sort of item that inevitably leads people to deplore the ignorance of the masses. While ignorance is deplorable, instead of blaming the masses, we might more appropriately look at the elites.
The overwhelming majority of people are never going to look at a budget document. Insofar as they get any information on the budget, it is from reporters who tell them how much we spend in various areas of the budget. (They may get this information indirectly from their friends who read the newspaper or listen to news.)
When they hear about spending, they will invariably hear things like we spend $40 billion a year on foreign aid or $17.3 billion on Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). Most people will think these figures are large sums, since they dwarf the sums that people see in their daily lives. In fact, the former is less than one percent of the $4.1 trillion that we will spend in 2017, while the latter is just over 0.4 percent of total spending.
The media could do a much better job of informing the public about spending (i.e. by doing their job) if they made a point of putting these figures in context. As it is, giving people these really huge numbers without context is essentially telling them nothing. As an alternative, they could make a point of always referring to these numbers as a share of the budget and/or expressing them on a per person basis (e.g. the spending on TANF comes to a bit more than $50 per person per year from every person in the country).
I have harangued reporters on this point for decades. No reporter has ever tried to argue that any significant share of their audience had any idea of what these large budget numbers mean. Yet, the practice persists.
I thought I had scored a big victory in this effort a few years back when Margaret Sullivan, who was then public editor of the New York Times, wrote a strong piece completely agreeing with the need to express budget numbers in context. She got David Leonhardt, the NYT’s Washington editor at the time, to agree as well.
This seemed to indicate that the paper would change its policy on budget reporting. Given the enormous importance of the NYT, as the nation’s preeminent newspaper, such a change would have a substantial impact on reporting elsewhere. This was a huge deal, which I celebrated at the time.
But no, the NYT did not change its practice. It continued to report really big numbers, without any context, which everyone knows are meaningless to the vast majority of even its well-educated readership.
Okay, so the masses are ignorant about the budget. I and other economist nerd types would like the public to have more knowledge about our area of expertise. But the child care worker who spent her day dealing with out-of-control three-year-olds, or the bus driver who was tied up in traffic for eight hours, is not going to come home and start looking at budget documents from the Congressional Budget Office.
At most, these people will spend a few minutes reading the article about the budget in their local paper or listening to a short story on the evening news. If these sources just give them really big numbers, without any context, how is the public supposed to know about the budget?
Look, I understand that we have racists who want to believe that all their tax dollars are going to good for nothing dark-skinned people and that many of them would believe this regardless of what facts they are presented with. However, we have plenty of non-racists who also believe something like this because they hear that we spend really big numbers on TANF, food stamps, and other programs that help low-income people.
We can point fingers at the racists and denounce their racism and stupidity if that makes us feel good. But a more productive path would be to change what we should be able to change. We should be able to get reporters to do their jobs and report budget numbers in a way that mean something to their audience. What’s the problem here?
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2 Comments
Obviously, similar efforts can be made in any state. Weve been aiming at the military busget for years now. While little prigres has been made on that front, we’ve grown a diverse, state wide coalition that we call upon to push dorward this work. Perhaps this crisis affords an opportunity to galvanize our allies and see some real action soon.
We can’t wait for the media to educate the public. Here in MA, we are working to pass “Revenue Information and Accountability” bills in the state legislature that would send budget information to every taxpayer. Read the message sent to the MA Peace Action listserve below. And heres a link for taking action: http://org.salsalabs.com/o/161/c/3952/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=20944
President Trump and his Republican allies have already begun to cut federal programs critical to our health and welfare, while proposing provocative and wasteful increases in Pentagon spending. Unfortunately, few citizens have a clear grasp of the spending allocations in the Congressional budget (see pie chart at link for 2015 spending). Even fewer understand how changes in these programs alter the federal tax dollars returned to Massachusetts.
2017 President’s Proposed Discretionary Spending
As a first step in arming our citizens to respond to Congressional budget actions, Representatives Mike Connolly and Denise Provost, and State Senator Pat Jehlen, have filed a bill to instruct the Secretary of Administration and Finance to provide this key information to Massachusetts taxpayers.
If this Act is passed by our State Legislature, the Congressional budget information in the piechart for subsequent years would be sent to taxpayers, together with the estimated changes following from federal and Congressional budget authorizations.